1.27.2010 The weather did turn in my favor, and I got an excellent snorkel in that afternoon. Similar vibe to paragraph below. CEBU CITY, 1/22 And the next morning, too...I hopped in the boat with the divers, and we went just up the shore from Panagsama Beach to where the reef drops off to infinity or so it appears. The reef itself is under only a few feet of water, and you spend your time about 100 feet from shore. The boat dropped the divers, and then moved to the pick up point, maybe 100 yards further away. I was the only snorkeler so I was on my own. It was magical, the diversity and activity of the reef was mind boggling. The best spot was to hang out over the drop off, and look down the underwater cliff. I saw grey and yellow puffer fish, bright goldenrod boxfish, Moorish idols, parrotfish, many of them quite large, and all the stripey, spotty, colorful things you can imagine. As the corals breathed out, the fish would teem to feed, and often leave the reef to chase tasty bits, so I would find myself in a cloud of butterfly-hued small fish. Some fish congregate in dense, writhing clumps. There are also tiny creatures, who bear some resemblance to sea horses, but straightened out, who lay on the coral heads, sometimes two would appear to be snuggling. There were crown-of-thorns starfish, and more agile black brittle stars. Coral that glowed ultraviolet from within, coral that was vibrantly alive, and coral that that spread out like a huge birdbath covered in tiny antlers. A sea turtle would drift by now and then. I spent most of my time drifting over the reef looking down but when I looked ahead just under the surface of the water there were tiny sardines, and goofy looking trumpet fish. I saw something big off the cliff, roughly the dimensions of a sunfish, but not quite that big--but tall and skinny like that. No sharks, no real jellyfish. There are poisonous fish in the area, such as lionfish, but I never saw them. Sea snakes, too, but I never saw them. Sharks...but never saw them. The area is renowned for occasional whale shark sightings, that’s kind of the holy grail for divers coming to the area, but none were spotted (well, they are *all* spotted) while I was in Panagsama. Other highlights were tiny little fish that were as thin as leaves, that hovered upright together down by the coral like a kind of seaweed, but with black and orange stripes. And on the cliff face, bright yellow feather dusters, and balls of swarming sardine-like fish. I’m a good swimmer, and had a good feel for how long the dives were lasting, so I was meeting up with the boat no problem. I had time for one afternoon snorkel, and the boat was heading to Pescador Island, where I had my first snorkel that week, which was pleasant and mellow. The weather in the afternoon wasn’t awesome, but I figured I’d have one more swim in. Like last time, the boat dropped me and the divers, and the plan was for me to swim around the island and meet the boat on the otherside. I jumped in and went off, again, I was the only snorkeler. Huge shoals of silver fish congregated, and the trumpet fish here were bigger and hungrier. The other fish, too--parrotfish and other large reef fish were even bigger, about the one foot variety. The boat was gone. I was all alone. But we were on the side of the island facing Cebu, and it was not the same big slab of reef, but a smaller skirt and then the rather intimidating drop off to open water. And the wind suddenly came up, and the sun was gone in the clouds, and then the waves were *really* rough. Was the boat 100 feet around the bend, or 100 yards? A free rock stuck out from the island, and no reef past it. And the waves increased in frequency, and suddenly, it was strange out there...and not good strange. Waves were making the snorkel useless, and swimming difficult. There was no way I was going to swim around that rock, the wind was blowing in and the waves were starting to crash with spray. Uh oh. All alone. Strong waves, and the island itself was a column of rock, no shore to swim to. Swim the other way? Nope. But, also, while I was trying to figure out what to do, I was also taking water in my mouth on occasion...this was really starting to get scary. I knew there was only one thing to do: get out. But the island is a cliff, with big waves smashing it...how? Miraculously, on this uninhabited rock, there was concrete staircase up the side of one cliff, a few stone carved steps below it. They were about 3 feet out of the water tho. I hoped there would be footholds and that they wouldn’t be slippery. I had to time my arrival between waves and then approach. I grabbed, there were some places to get a grip, and despite the pull of incoming and recding waves, I hauled myself up (no flippers, so my feet were free, thank the lord). The rocks were more pointy than slick, which was fine by me. I made it to the steps and went up to the top of the island. Phew. Contemplating the very real fact I could have drowned if I had been less of a swimmer, I set my mind on alerting the boat to my presence, which proved impossible--the surface of the rock was sharp volcanic stone, with impenetrable brush growing on it--I would have to fight and hack my way to any point on the circle, and no way of knowing *where* on the circle the boat was. So, I figured they would come looking for me after the divers came in and I didn’t. I was prob. 20 minutes, but it was a looong 20. But, I did what any sensible person would do: I enjoyed the view. I could observe Cebu and Negros, and the sun had come out a bit (still windy and wavy tho). Debris floated in to the island--leaves and the odd coconut. Fish would come up to investigate. And, then, a farily big turtle emerged and poked its head out of the water, and stuck around for a bit. Eventually the boat came around, and I went back down the steps, and had to again time my entry into the water between big waves. I dove forward with the mask around my neck, and had to actually swim around that damn rock to where the boat had grabbed one of the floating permanent moorings, a plastic tub attached to big underwater ropes. That swim of 50 feet or so was really difficult, and again I am a really good, strong swimmer. I had made the right decision to get out. I had some cuts on my feet, legs and elbow from the sharp rocks, but I was alive. It changes your day. At 4.30 my car came to take me to Cebu. I paid my hotel bill, my whole week there had cost me a couple hundred bucks--hotel, meals, snorkeling, and the 2.5-hour drive each way from/to Cebu City--all told. Amazing. The car headed out of the village, and I spent the drive alternating between surreal dozing, further contemplation between the thin line between life and death, and observing the dense thicket of human activity that lined the road--steel plants, crowded churches full of singing, drum-beating church processions, markets and eateries, many just shacks, of all sizes. Goats, scrawny dogs. Big deluxe houses and thatch huts. We got into the city, past its industrial harbor old downtown, which seems to be largely crumbling, but looks of decrepitude can be deceiving here...just because something looks like an abandoned, nearly toppling shell doesn’t mean its not still an active enterprise. We started to head up the hill, past big modern hotels and gleaming malls, each inch of progress made in sheer willful defiance of the abject gridlock that had the city in lockdown mode on Friday night. My driver finally gave up his assault on the hill, and pulled into the parking lot of some gleaming tower to take a leak, recalibrate his approach, and like 2 minutes later (this is after fighting up the hill for 40 minutes on our first attempt) we were at the venue. If it was that easy.... The Outpost has a kind of Hollywood Hills bungalow vibe, nestled into a tranquil nook up above the fracas that is central Cebu City. There’s a main cottage that’s fully indoors, with a small stage, tables, a bar and restaurant kitchen (plus a little conference room for backstage) and then outside there are a couple different levels of patio, mostly covered, and integrated into the surrounding trees. Quite cozy, a little bit of a treehouse vibe. I was soon greeted by Sandy, the owner, a young and energetic guy, we’d been in touch setting up the show for some time. And, soon arrived Chicoy, the 40-something uncle of my Manila promoter, Joff. Joff was introduced to me by Mohd, my labelmate from Malaysia, and Joff in turn introduced me to Sandy in Cebu City, my promoters in Vietnam, and his uncle Chicoy, who offered me his home for the night. Chicoy is a painter, and he lives in a big house outside the city with his wife, a teacher who used to sing in a rock band, his teenage daughter and his twenty-something son. The whole family plays a little music, sometimes together...more on this later. So, I had some food from the kitchen and then set up and soundcheckedd. Chicoy had brought his son’s Ibanez electric, modeled on the Jackson shape that you’ve seen in many a hair metal video. It didn’t stay in tune very well, and I asked about the beautiful ’59 ES-135 hanging on the wall. “Oh, that doesn’t have all the strings, uh....” etc etc. Not a complete no, but I would need to work that small window of opportunity. “I have some strings....” and so I put on the top three strings, and soon the guitar’s owner, a local musician and partner in the venue came in and gave his blessing. It had no front strap pin but my sound engineer worked out some plastic twine and we were in business. Played thru a small Orange amp, it sounded beautiful and looked really cool. My piano sounded good too. People started to trickle in for the show. It didn’t take many of them to fill up the available tables. But there was some music coming in from the outside...the Children’s Joy Foundation was jamming out on the patio. CJF is an organization that takes orphaned and abandoned kids off the streets and helps them get cleaned up, educated and productive. Sometimes the kids go out with a supervisor and play music--an adult on guitar, and the kids sing, play guitar, banduria, a kind of mandolin with a banjo body,and percussion. Two little girls danced. They played sweet old-timey music, local and otherwise. They wrapped it up, passed the hat, and then I went inside and did my show. A collection of local musicians, a handful of curious expats from various non-Asian countries, regulars who had no idea what the program was for the evening, and a large table at which Chicoy’s family and friends were seated, had filled up the small room--we’re talking 40 people here, but it was full. Occasional stragglers would amble in, and more often as not, amble out, feeling too self-conscious to be the only one standing in a room full of people seated at tables. There was a trio of 60-something couples having a bottle of chilled wine; there were some nervous and giggly kids who had to have been about 20, and Chicoy’s daughter (named Chicay) and her teenage friends. Quite a diverse crowd. The place was pretty noisy, and the fact is that the door to the outside was immediately to my right, so, servers carrying plates from the kitchen (completed orders announced with a bell), as well as new arrivals coming in, all had to travel on the path between the stage and the audience. So, my ability to walk into the crowd and sing unaccompanied was hampered by the layout--there was no space really to wander in between tables, and I was quite nervous about my cables being something for a server to trip over. So, generally, I stayed back at the mic. Now, I would describe the reaction to what I was doing as mostly polite, curious, etc. I was thinking that something was off, like, was there a bird perched on my head I didn’t know about? I played my songs, and wasn’t really feeling like the ultimate connection had been made. Finally, an audience member timidly requested a Posies song, and the first notes of Solar Sister caused the room to go nuts. Basically, people had been waiting 17 years to hear the Posies live in Cebu City, and my unreleased solo stuff was rather in the way of that.....from then on, the ice was broken. I mixed my songs with Posies and Big Star songs, and people were seriously going completely crazy. It was then that I remembered looking at sales sheets for Frosting on the Beater and being surprised by significant numbers of sales in the Philippines and Thailand. I thought it was all expats and US army PX sales...and I was so, so fundamentally wrong. I thought I was done, too...but as I tried to wrap it up, I had requests for ‘Love Comes’ and more stuff, and now, the kids (there was a group of local musicians who would definitely have been too young to have heard FOTB at the time of release, so word of mouth was expanding the Posies myth) were up at the stage, and I was playing songs from FOTB and more, and people were loving it. Photos were taken on every cell phone. I could see Chicoy rolling his eyes and laughing, he and his family were sort of counting on getting out of there a lot earlier, but they were cool. Finally I said my goodbyes, was handed some money (a surprise, as it was a free show) and piled my stuff into Chicoy’s van and we drove to White Sands, on a smaller island connected to Cebu by a short bridge. Bonus of this location, the house Chicoy inherited from his late mom, is that it’s only 15 minutes from the airport, which would make things easy the next day. But this day wasn’t over yet...as we settled in to their totally-Brady Bunch house, Chicoy’s boy busted out the guitars, Chicoy sat down at a drum kit set up on their patio, and we jammed, on Led Zep and Yardbirds tunes til like 2am...seriously, we were outside, and Chicoy was full on beating the drums, I was wailing on the Ibanez, and there was an acoustic for my jam partner. The neighbors actually put up with this for like an hour before they called and said, “uh....” MANILA, 1/23 A wickedly strong coffee, a full blast broadcast of the guitar duel from the film ‘Crossroads’ and we were off in the morning to Cebu City airport. Chicoy dropped me off, and wished me luck. I was quickly set upon by an airport roadie of sorts who sported a casual uniform and ID badge, and was quickly off with my passport before I could say ‘flat eric’. He reappeared minutes later with my boarding pass, and proceeded to roadie me thru the initial security (all bags go thru an x ray on the way in to Philippine airports), the check in, and to the frontier of gate security. I knew a tip was coming, and I tell you what, he earned it, this whole biz took less than 5 minutes, and I could see where he was pushing stuff thru much more quickly than I would have navigated on my own. I tipped him a few 100 piso notes and he was happy, and I was happy. Nothing much to see on the flight, I was on the inside aisle of yet another totally packed A330. Landed in Manila and claimed my stuff, and exited, and was beset upon by the taxi guys. I agreed to much too high a flat rate for my destination, and off we went. Manila is enormous, as my aerial surveys have shown. Public transport has been unable to really grapple with its immensity: there’s a rather limited metro train consisting of three lines. Most people travel by jeepney, which are marvelous beasts, they are share taxis, that stop either on demand or at marked stops in some cases, and travel on regular routes, the highlights of which are painted on the sides of the vehicle. The vehicle itself has a front end like a jeep, and back end like...hmmm. It’s a covered bed with benches along the sides. The vehicles are customized with paint jobs but also striking use of chrome--some are entirely silver, some are painted in fiery colors, most utilize chrome and paint in various combos. Some of the front ends are decorated with customized metal bits, some are plain old jeep fronts, many you could see the cooling fan on the radiator was a vintage desk fan, things like that. They are ubiquitous, you never have to wait for one, because there are hundreds going up any major street. Usually the back would be packed with ten or so passengers. I have to admit, I never took one. Cabs by Yanqui standards are really cheap. We wound our way once the traffic broke shortly out of the airport to Eastwood City, itself a clump of high rise towers and a big mall in the middle of Quezon City, itself a subnucleus of Manila. Manila is too big to have one center; there’s the old city on the bay, that dates back to the earliest days of Spanish colonialism (and beyond); govt agencies are here. There’s several main CBD’s all with huge towers and for sure each one will have at least one mega mall. In that sense Manila is comprised of layers--the urban poor, the affluent, and the mega affluent would be the main divisions--and like most places, they never encounter each other in social life. The affluent, which doesn’t take much money to be (in that sense each layer has its own economy, tailored to its abilities)--they had comfortable apartments, usually a driver or other servants, and seemed to exist my going from mall to mall for all their entertainment and shopping needs. Most of my friends in Manila would be this category. The urban poor live in tin roof shacks, conglomerations of which could occur anywhere. To keep the populations separated, to prevent the undeniable squalor from bumming the high of the middle class (remember where most revolutions come from and why), the city has actually built walls around some of the favelas, and created facades of more attractive looking buildings to keep the view of the third world conditions from bumming everyone’s high. But still, it’s hard to miss. My 18th-floor apartment looked across the river at one shanty town, and as we took the metro we looked down on millions of shacks, all jammed against one another, with no visible streets amongst them, just mysterious passages winding anthill like thru the hive. My show was at Route 196, a tiny, tiny little bar with a tiny stage. The main room could fit about 25 people seated at tables or sitting at the bar, and there was a lower level room separated by glass from the main room, it was 2 steps below the main room in level, and had cozier seating, you could get another 25 people here. So, it wasn’t hard to fill up the place, well--it almost was. Despite the fact we had some of the best and most well-known musicians in town on the bill, plus a rare international act, there was a huge free show across town with like 20 bands. But, that kept the riff raff out and those who really wanted to come to see this show, as opposed to *a* show, were there. Kate Torralba was up first, Kate is becoming quite famous as a fashion designer, we visited her boutique in Manila’s most posh shopping center. And her music is getting attention, too. She has years of training on the piano, so she can play anything, any style, and she has a kind of crooner voice which she puts over the top. I ran sound for her, more or less and she was visibly nervous at my presence, hahah! After she played the brother and sister guitar/piano duo of Outerhope played, they are really good...brilliant vocal harmonies thru every song...then Camera Walls played but I took a break as the place was pretty small for a full band to play, concrete walls made a mighty bright sound. But, I did go back in to watch Gaijin, which features Raimund Marasigan of the band Eraserheads, who have been called ‘The Beatles of the Philippines’. As the name implies, there’s a yanqui in the band, the singer, Jesse Grinter. They play a kind of angular rock that reminded me a bit of Television. As things run very late in Philippines, I went on after midnite...and played til something like 3am. My voice was warmed up from the show the night before, and I was singing really well so I was into it, and the people wouldn’t let me stop. Highlights: a couple of people dirty dancing to ‘Known Diamond’. A kid named Francis who was handing out his poetry zine singing Neil Young and the Replacements covers I pulled out WAY louder than me (and I’m loud)--oh, by the way, this brings up the fact that as I may have mentioned, the Philippines are stuck safely in the 80s music wise, from most PsOV. I mentioned hearing the Outfield and Quiet Riot in my stay in Panagsama, and the radio was all about the Bryan Adams power ballads and Peter Cetera doin’ it all for the glory of love...and tho you don’t think of them as an ‘80s’ band, they did the bulk of their work then...so I was blown away to hear The Replacements ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’ in the taxi on the way to the gig...woah. The show was an unqualified success, the locals and expats in the audience all loved it, and I was definitely in the groove. Darryl and Laura, a fan from UK who is living in Manila working for a bank and one of his banking colleagues respectively, had a private car and driver (not an unusual thing here--the fact is: the Philippines is the 12th most populous country on earth, and will soon cross the 100,000,000 mark. There is a huge spread in the amount of money made by the lowest and the top rung--the weight of poverty pulls prices and wages in their direction, allowing the purchasing power of the top rung to skyrocket), and dropped me off at the flat. On Sunday, I slept in--it was like 4am when I got home. Had my morning coffee while it was still morning and had a fish belly sour soup at the mall. There is, thankfully, a place serving Pinoy food amongst all the Starbucks and “Mediterranean Bistro”s. Eventually my friends rose from the dead--Joff, who put on the show, was still at the club when I said my 3.30am nite nites. He and I met up and took the metro (we had to cab to the nearest metro stop, as I mentioned before the metro can’t begin to encompass the girth depth and breadth of Manila’s 600 sq. km/230 sq. mi.) to the center. We disembarked and walked down into what is massive street market...after the Logan’s Run vibe of the Eastwood mall, all spacious and planned and manicured, here was the city of 11,000,000 as you would imagine its supposed to be: chaos. Throngs of people jamming alleys, jeepneys and cars pushing their way thru. Crippled beggars, car stereo shops with whumping subs (there was one blasting music out of a speaker six inches from the ears of a sleeping dog. I thought they could hear, like...way more than people?). Pirate DVDs, piss, flat dried out squid...smells colors and above all masses of people. Overwhelming, but exhilarating. We walked the alleys and emerged a big square where there was a massive church service going on. The church was a concrete box, more or less, bug huge. And overflowing--a big screen was set up in the square so more worshippers could get in on it. Of course, there was commerce too--all the little tapered candles people burn in church, there were millions for sale, and other paraphernalia. We crossed the square, and hopped a cab (with some effort, as this edge of the square was a major landing zone for jeepneys) to Intramuros. Intramuros traces the walls of the Spanish fortifications that replaced the Islamic Sultanate’s HQ there. Cebu was actually the first Spanish settlement in the Philippines, but they had gotten word that Luzon had good stuff, and soon arrived to steal Manila from the locals. And that they did, and held onto it for 300 years. Technically it is the center of Manila, but it’s not the beating heart of the city. In fact, it’s downright desolate compared the market where we were, near the Recto MRT station. That was definitely some kind of organ of the city, perhaps a bit of each one...Intramuros is sleepy and tranquil, completely different vibe. Big vintage-1960s government agency buildings, lots of churches, and quite a few buildings in the process of crumbling. Oddly, the whole fortified walled place is ringed by a golf course, which insulates it further from the city’s bustle. You can access the walls and walk around quite a bit of them, the golf course on the exterior, on the interior a few food stalls there and there, but mostly...nothings. Couples hang out on the wall, the wall dips thru the shady spots from big trees on either side. Church was in full swing so the cathedrals were packed, but other than that...empty. Beautiful. When you’re at ground level, you can look into little dungeons built into the wall (the Japanese made use of these during their visit...) many filled with tantalizing bits of antique oddities...not in a museum way, but in a dad’s garage kind of way, but we’re talking about museum quality pieces of old coffee mills, scales...most fascinating. From there we hitched a taxi ride to Makati, the financial hub of Manila, and went to...yep, a mall. The mall enclosed a massive courtyard packed with people sitting at patio tables....and no less then 5 coffee shops catering to them, including the Death Starbucks and Seattle’s Best. Totally weird. We met up with Kate Torralba and her producer Malek Lopez, and dined on something they call corned beef in broth, but it didn’t bear any resemblance to the corned beef that I grew up in such fear of. It was very good. We also had Kare-Kare, which is oxtail, tripe and beef in peanut sauce--wow. That’s good stuff. And some extremely crispy fried pork. This is heavy stuff, it takes some serious fortitude to be a member of the clean your plate club. So good. After that we cabbed to ANOTHER mall for a coffee and tiny round cheesecake to share. I had mentioned my interest in Civet cat-shit coffee, which in the Philippines is called Motit Coffee, Motit being the name for the Asian Palm Civet in Philippines. It is often translated as ‘fox’ but the Civet, which is not a cat, but a kind of mammal that is grouped in the family “Viverridae” which means “fucking weird mammals that no one knows what to do with”--including Genets, which are sort of cat-like, and binturong, which are just fucking crazy. Anyway, the Civet has a nose for very ripe coffee, which is a berry in case you’ve forgotten, since we call them beans. It eats the ripest, choicest berries, and shits out the beans. And people grind this up and drink it...it’s kind of pre roasted. Now, people have been drinking this stuff in Indonesia and Vietnam and Philippines for a long time. But, I’m confused because I never thought of the Philippines as a coffee-growing nation, unlike the other two. Anyway, it’s available in the Philippines, and we went to a coffee shop just to look for it. And it was closed. And Kate, being a pretty good talker, pushed her way in and commanded a sale of the shop’s last bag, and handed it to me as a gift. Dang! I flew onward to Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, where I’ve been now for a couple of days. I arrived in on Monday afternoon, spent some time getting my visa together. Basically, if you go the official way, you are supposed to send your passport in to a Vietnamese embassy, wait while they process your visa, they mail back your passport. That’s all fine and dandy for those people that travel like, once per lifetime. Some of us, however, actually work for a living and that work involves frequent, global travel. Who has time to give up their passport? Plus, I just *got* this one, I’m not letting go of it. Uh-unh, no way. But, a little looking around online and you can find Vietnamese travel agencies who can prepare a visa on arrival if you are flying in to Hanoi or HCMC, for a processing fee of about $15. The visa itself you pay for when you arrive, and it’s $25. With that in mind, you think...why would you bother doing it the official way? Basically the via on arrival is meant for large groups, but the agencies just bundle you as if you are in a group with the other recipients that day. It makes no difference once you arrive that you are not part of a group. I arrived, filled out a form, got the visa and Ho’s your uncle. My host, Rod, soon arrived after I exited the arrivals area. HCMC is perpetually 90F, significantly more sweltering than anywhere I’d been on this trip, actually. But, I’m a lizard, and I think that feels good. Rod is a restaurant entrepreneur of Australian extraction, here’s been in the country for years and is married to a local lady. In fact, it’s easy to start feeling like HCMC is a very small village, populated mostly by Anglo speaking dudes with Vietnamese wives...but anyway, Vietnam is a very dynamic and welcoming place, albeit with a very unique system of governance and society, and it’s growing like a weed in a manner that is pretty much unstoppable and recession-proof. It’s the 13th most populous country on earth, 60% of those people are under 30. What else is it? Beautiful. Layered. I will have a hard time describing HCMC. It’s so many things at once...hyper modern, hyper jerry-rigged, spacious and leafy, dusty and crowded...full of characters and folks just doin’ they thang. Every inch of the place is picturesque, patinated just so. Old ladies balance counterweighted baskets of stuff, in the famous pointy hats. Skyscrapers are going up in rapid fasion. But still, most of the city is just 4-5 stories high, and where I’m staying, right in the center, has lots of gorgeous colonial buildings, tree-lined avenues, and such. I’ve never seen such a precarious electrical grid--the telephone poles support literally hundreds of individual wires, snarling at intersections in a fantastic rat nest of phone calls, email, and juice to keep the lights on. Speaking of email, Facebook is banned in Vietnam. It’s considered to helpful to possible pro-democracy dissidents. It’s hard to believe that this sizzling hotbed of abject capitalism, which is luring folks like Rod to come here and open restaurants and resorts and such, in which as a visitor you don’t really see obvious manifestations of government power, is technically a communist state with unelected leaders. But other than banning Facebook and making you wait a little bit for your visa, it’s hard to really see what Communism is doing here...other than getting the hell out of the way before it gets run over by all the new cars on the road. Speaking of which, I was proud to quickly pick up the art of crossing massive multilane roads with no crossing signals...how you slowly but steadily pick your way across giving the drivers time to adjust, and they do. The first night I was taken out by American expat Curtis King, to a penthouse bar in some hotel, admittedly the free wine we had at Pacharan, Rod’s flagship resto, and the bottle of montrachet we had with dinner had really killed me, I was sort of levitating at this point, plus jet lag, but I managed to join the house cover band for rousing versions of “One I Love” and “Losing My Religion”, it was hilarious. Cover bands are big thing here. Asia’s music vibe in general is that a good song is one that is going to be good in karaoke, it’s changed the face of music here forever. So, Celine Dion, or perhaps the Eagles, rules the....ahem, roost. Cover bands’ popularity here sort of supports that theory, it’s like live karaoke where you don’t have to actually *do* anything. Like watching sports on TV and feeling like an athlete... Yesterday I walked around in search of lunch. In my centrally-located neighborhood it’s all about the Mediterranean bistros again...even a Texas BBQ place. Uh, I didn’t come here for the burgers. The resto’s are on the streets, where they can be seen. Where Vietnamese people eat are in alleys, which are off the traffic a bit. I ducked into one and found a tiny hole in the wall. My god. For less than $2 I had a pile of rice with greens and the 4 spring rolls I’d picked out (no one spoke English and there were no non-Vietnamese inside, ahhh). Two of the 4 were black, made of ground beef and spices. Then there was a slice of fish, white fish with very thick ribs, this was a steak slice, you know, with the round of the spine at the top as a circle. It the slice was in a sauce of sweet chili and black pepper. Boy howdy was that good. A little soup with leaves came with it, and at the bottom of the soup were three tiny, tiny shrimp. This lunch was made with love, served with care, and ridiculously dirt cheap. In Paris you couldn’t even buy the 3 bug-sized shrimp for that price. Last night we stopped by the Acoustic club, where a madly brilliant house band plays covers with different vocalists. I did a couple of songs--”Ooh Child” and “Moon River”, and these guys were able to follow me no problem, even with the complex chord changes of the Mancini tune. WOW. But I was feeling like a rank amateur when Dinh Tuan-Khanh, vocalist of the band Microwave, came up and did a few songs, I recognized “Enter Sandman” but not the others but it didn’t matter. This guy, seriously, could win American Idol. He is an effortless, fucking full on singer, 22 years old, bespectacled and unassuming, doesn’t really speak much English apparently but when he sings...he’s just a belter, man. Like Dio, or Ian Gillian, or...woah!!! He’s awesome. The stuff on their myspace doesn’t really cut it, I’m afraid. He’s like the best live singer I’ve seen singing hard rock, and everyone was saying, oh, he’s not even the best in this *bar*...that guy comes on Saturday. As for Rod, he's really the ultimate host, and he loves his adopted city, and has been a great person to have showing you what's what and where it is. Today Rod guided me to bank xeo, no, not a futuristic Asian place to put your life savings, but a kind of pancake, made from corn, with shrimp and pork adhered to it. You slice a chunk, and wrap it in lettuce, along with raw fresh herbs and bit of fish sauce, chili’d to taste. Excellent. I can’t really help you on the visual description of this magnificent city. It could take several coffee table books to even start to relate the endless magnificent details of this town....I’ll try a few photos, perhaps...later. Love KS Ho Chi Minh City, VIETNAM 1.20.2010 I forgot to blog this last week, but when I was Charles de Gaulle airport looking for where to check in for my flight to Bahrain, I noticed something extremely odd on the board: EasyJet flt 8031. This flight had a scheduled destination of: Paris Orly. Like, evidently, it was ferrying passengers from one end of Paris to another? I was intrigued. I have sniffed around on the net and failed to find anything about what 8031 would normally be doing... SINGAPORE, 1/10 When I was writing last, I was under the impression we were almost in Singapore. Two enormous terminals on either side of the bridge between Malaysia and Singapore at the Woodlands Crossing (the bridge paralleled by enormous pipes that bring in much of Singapore’s fresh water--there are frequent dramas played out here when the countries find themselves having a spat) handle the outgoing and incoming traffic. Getting out of Malaysia took about 5 minutes. Getting into Singapore...longer. Seems like no one mentioned we had about 150 CDs from the label--albums by The Disciplines, Jay, and other artists on the label--in the back of the van. All vehicles are subject to a visual inspection that includes looking in the trunk. So, we weren’t exactly smugglers but this was a significant amount of commercial product that wasn’t exactly free to cross the border with us. So, they took the stuff away, and Amar stayed behind to negotiate--he has an uncle working on the inside, so, he figured he could yank a few strings from the inside. To this day, I have no idea if the efforts were successful! After waiting around for while to see if the situation would resolve, we finally went on ahead. We pulled into a parking area, and strolled over to the impossible-to-miss Durian-textured fly eyes known as the Esplanade, a performing arts complex on Singapore’s waterfront, where The Posies and I performed in 2006 as part of the Bay Beats Festival. We were met by Patrick, who had organized today’s show, and who also plays in the band Typewriter; I did some recording with them in 2006 on sessions for an album they are still working on now...Patrick led us into the Bond-villian’s-lair, squeaky clean loading deck and backstage area to let us dump our bags etc. Actually, it wasn’t long before soundcheck was proposed, since we had spent even longer than anticipated at the border. So, I went out to the same small concrete amphitheatre that I played in 2006, and saw a lovely backline set up. I took away the music stands, haha, that’s wild optimism on the part of the crew for ya...I had a cool matte black 335 provided by Gibson, and all the stuff on the backline was in good shape and the right bits, so soundcheck was easy--pretty much telling the sound guy to use less and less of the PA, til we had it about right, then the digital board reset itself and we had the pleasure of doing the soundcheck one more time. Luckily, with me, that’s a very short process. This completed, we went to eat. There’s a few new things visible at the waterfront now, since my last visit--first, a massive construction project--three massive towers, connected by a multistory platform at their summits, all part of a huge new casino and hotel complex. And, at Esplanade, a small Hawker Center--food stalls around a common court. In no time I was bravely attacking a chili crab despite the fact that I was wearing white jeans, PLUS gado gado PLUS a big coconut to sip. I think there were other things too...I’d missed lunch. So, this was as much as meal as it was vengeance. Then it the sun started to fall, and it was showtime. Talk about an easy gig--I played two 30-minute sets, Jay preceding me each time with a 3-song warm up. The show was free and open to the public; a great piece in Today Online brought out a curious range of curious spectators--fans who saw me last time; friends like Chang Kang from Typewriter; very surprised expat Yanks who had seen The Posies in SFO back in the day; babies; a white-haired grandma in a wheelchair (who stayed happily for both sets). There was a nice family vibe, and my walk-offstage, stand in the crowd and belt it out went over so well I felt like a kind of carnival sideshow performer, and that was fun. The two sets were different, the second one took more advantage of the piano, and people generally stayed for both, I’d guess 150 or so all told, maybe more at the peak. After the set and chatting with folks, I was beat so Patrick and Chang Kang took me to the hotel in a groovy little rig that looked like it should be delivering mail, but was in fact the official touring car of Patrick’s production co. On the way out the door I suddenly realized I would immediately be saying goodbye to Amar, Jay & Ili, in short order. I hate goodbyes (see my last post) and this was no exception, but the fact it had to be done pretty quicklike made it at least get over with and I could use the shock to keep off the displeasure of bidding farewell to my excellent travel companions, who had been so generous and helpful. I was incredibly beat, I had energy to iron some clean clothes and hit the hay, and that’s it. JAKARTA, 1/11 a day chock full of singles--1/11/10. Wait til next year tho. I had breakfast at the hotel, which turned out to be a very funny take on the continental breakfast--esp. odd after the heaping spreads offered by both of my Malaysian accommodations---the offerings: a bag of white bread, a toaster. Coffee in an urn. Uh...OK. Well, I had a piece of toast, chatted with a couple from Victoria BC who were vacationing, and then Patrick picked me up and took me to Singapore’s fantastic, shiny, and, today, practically empty, airport. There’s nothing better than an empty airport. Also, many airports I have visited on this trip have the brilliant idea to have security screening done at the gate--so, you are not bottlenecked at the entry point to all the airport services beyond. Patrick and I had time for a cafe (Starbucks has a tight grip on the Asian airport market) and I went to my flight, on Philippine airways. Their Indonesian flights have planes with extremely generous spacing of seats, I had more leg room than on some biz class flights. I landed in Jakarta, skirting along the north side of Java to see the flat lands, the seemingly flooded rice fields, and the hundreds of ships anchored around and moving in or out of Jakarta’s industrial, fishing, and pleasure craft harbors. We touched down, I picked up my visa, and was met by the hotel driver even before customs, which somehow gave me a free pass from any and all inspection. My hotel was the Sheraton, out near the airport, so as not to have too much of a commute the next morning, after hearing how long the travel can be in Jakarta’s snarling traffic. It wasn’t long before the hotel and surroundings were engulfed in what would be a familiar sight in Indonesia: mind blowing, squeezed-washcloth-of-God type of torrential rain. Like clouds declaring war on the planet...it’s impressive, really. It lasted about an hour, and its departure was timed perfectly with the arrival of Zeke and Yudhi, organizers of my show. Zeke is a musician, having had quite a bit of success with doing music for film lately. For many years he went to art school and generally lived it up in Seattle--tho we never met. He had been contacted just a few days before by Ili in Malaysia, and without hesitation put together a show in his home. His home, is his family home, his parents were in the govt/military and have some sweet digs, including the ground floor’s official reception hall, looking more or less like a ballroom, but with a stage for the giving of medals and what not. Zeke has taken this over and turned this into the base for his musical operations, having a great rehearsal place, and his own venue, if he wants to--but evidently I am the first foreign artist to perform there. Zeke is full of humor, energy, and personifies, I think the vibe that I got from Jakarta, at least based on the people I was hanging out with there, is a jumping, exciting, creative epicenter--the Hollywood for this nation of over 200 million (Yogyakarta would be more like the New York--in terms of being an artier, edgier, theatre-driven cultural capital). In fact, soon after we arrived we ran into Joko Anwar, perhaps the highest-profile director in Indonesia, whose recent films have been winning critical praise and festival prizes around the globe. I sat with Joko and chatted, and watched a bit of his reel, when we stumbled upon him at a coffee shop near Zeke’s place. Also, I ran into some cool kids from Bandung, who had driven over two hours to check out this show. The twitter and related blogospheric activity surrounding this show had been impressive, despite the fact that we were Monday nite and this show was booked on Friday, people knew about the show, and we had a more than decent size audience waiting back at Zeke’s place when I showed up--plus thanks to Zeke’s connections, those people included journalists (Rolling Stone has an Indonesian edition), promoters, musicians of every stripe. A local band played some emo-acoustic songs, and then I set up. Candles were lit in an arc around me, and I had a beautiful old Gibson hollowbody, and a real piano, too. The audience was mostly seated on the floor, and I gave everyone a seventh inning stretch at one point. I don’t know how long this show was, but it had to have been pretty long...and people were more than cool with that. At one point the vintage Fender Twin was showing signs of a dying capacitor, making some pops and crackles, so we switched it out...I wandered around the room, and at one point there was this girl, sort of trying to hide behind a wall panel, as a lumbered around, she was one of the few standing audience members. In between songs her friends said that she’s a singer, she should sing, so I dragged her out and ran her thru “Somethin’ Stupid” right on the spot, and, as it turns out, she was extremely good. Mian Tiara will release her first album of jazz influenced gentle pop in Indonesian and English soon. Jakarta itself is enormous. Flying over it is one thing, driving across it is another. The city is decentralized, the steel and glass buildings might pop up anywhere--there’s a few dvelopments on the waterfront(s); and then things poking up here and there. A lot of gigantic shopping centers--huge, multistory malls that give people some airconditioned window shopping entertainment. There’s shantytowns, or at least awfully rickety housing that stretches on for miles, a sea of corrugated tin roofs, out of which the shopping centers loom in gleaming, orderly contrast to the mosaic of habitation around them. Zeke’s neighborhood was more like a Beverly Hills, big homes with greenery and a modicum of quiet--but the pulse and throb of this city is ever present, and its invigorating. After the show, Zeke, Joko and other prinicpals of the evening went to a little eatery next to a mindblowing pirate DVD store--everything that you can imagine, stuff that’s still in the theatres, was available for about $1 per. Who, me? Buy pirated DVDs? Oh, no, sir...not me....ahem. Then Zeke and Yudhi drove me back to my hotel, by this late hour traffic had dispersed and we had the freeway largely to ourselves. When they pulled up into the Sheraton’s driveway (by the way, I am sure the location of this hotel is a former army training ground....there were some rotting items set up aorund that looked like boot camp training obstacles) our goodbyes were almost drowned out by frogs, living in a pool in front of the driveway. They were putting out enormous, high pitched drones, with complex harmonics shifting inside the sound, a la Tuvan throat singers--but two octaves higher. The next day was my first day off since arriving in Asia, and the next day would be my first complete day off--no work, no travel--since Christmas, three and half weeks ago. I was prepared to enjoy these and make the most of the opportunity for resting. In the morning I headed to Jakarta CGK, there’s an unusual system there in that you enter the terminal, and find there’s no check in desks, apparently--then you realize they are behind a kind of security. It takes proof of a ticket to get in, but in theory, but I just told the guy checking where I was flying and with who and that was sufficient. I put my bags thru a big scanner, and went thru a metal detector that beeped, producing no action other than ‘thank you sir’ from the security staff. I found the Garuda desk and was told I had to prepare my bag by tightening a plastic band around it, this service was provided nearby. Then I was on. More conventional security was done at the gate. On the way, I thought about browsing thru a Lonely Planet Guide in the airport bookstore, but each book and magazine that I encountered for sale in Indonesia was individually shrinkwrapped. No browsing. Before I left the hotel for the airport that morning I had breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, and discovered a new fruit: the salak, or snakeskin fruit. The outside is exactly what the name implies--brown scales that look completely reptilian. The salak is shaped usually like a fig, with a round end and a pointy end, but they can be more round. It is about the size of a large fig, maybe a bit bigger sometimes. The skin is...like a lizard skin in texture too. Uncanny. The skin comes off easily, it’s not adhered to the fruit really. Inside, you’ll find 3-4 lobes, like garlic cloves, each one containing a very hard, large stone. The texture of the fruit is somewhat like a crunchy apple, maybe a little more rubbery (like raw garlic). The taste is sweet and fragrant, similar to Japanese pear. Java was cloudy, but as we approached Yogyakarta, I could see the details on the ground, and our descent seemed to glide us inches above the surrounding mountains. I could clearly see Prambanan, the thousand year old Hindu temple, and its surrounding structures. We touched down at the Adisujipto Airport, and I marched into the terminal, the day humid and delightfully (remember two and half weeks in Tromso?) hot. I changed some more money, got my bag, and was met by the hotel driver. We entered into Yogyakarta, which because of its lack of skyscrapers, and generally low key and decentralized layout, would easily fool any Western traveler into thinking it was a small town--but in fact it’s city of some 4 million people. Busy sidewalks, with small shops and restaurants, some just a couple of sheets of Visqueen away from becoming more of an existential notion of a business as opposed to an edified establishment; there were some main streets, buzzing with motorbikes, cars, buses and pedicabs. Indonesia a right-hand drive country, but the delineation of who shall go what direction and where they will do it was in a state of constant negotiation, bordering on just saying ‘fuck it’. The old town centers on the kraton, the palace of the sultan, who serves as governor of the region. back in the day, Java itself was made up of small principalities, and some of these principalities as well as ones on other islands, occasionally swelled and engulfed neighboring ones; they split as brother princes broke off from each other’s rule, and so on. Now the sultans of different areas roughly equivalent to their former sovereignties are unelected regional governors. The current sultan in Yogya (which is pronounced and can be written Jogja) is an entrepreneur who owns a cigarette and cigar factory (Kraton brand ciggies) and other industries in the area. So you have the Kraton, which is a complex of intricately walled compounds and outbuildings all enclosed in an outer wall, itself enclosed in yet another outer wall that engulfs a subset of the city itself--technically everything inside the walls belongs to the sultan, but land is leased, lent, rights of exploitation passed on, etc and this city in miniature is home to some 25,000 people. There’s a kind of fairgrounds with carnival attractions, and much commerce from the ‘batik mafia’. The BMs are local shorthand for people who sell what appear to be handcrafted traditional textiles, but at gringo-gouging prices. In fact, everywhere I went inside the kraton, residents and people working--pedicab drivers, food stall cooks, and of course the free tourist guide that accompanies visitors to the small area of the inner kraton that is open to public visitors, told me the same, apparently memorized speech--about how the Yogya textile center had the only legit craftspeople, the lowest prices, and the seal of approval from the gov’t., and to beware of said batik cosa nostra. The thing is, I hate to say it, but crafty stuff like batik is not really my area of interest. I had to politely decline a huge amount of attempted stimulation of potential interest, which is understandable--Indonesians are proud of their traditions, which are magnificent and rich, and of course everyone loves to make a buck. Jogja is Indonesia’s center of learning--over 150 Universities are located here--and it’s the epicenter of Javan culture, the site of its most impressive ancient monuments. But at the moment, on Tuesday afternoon when I checked in to my hotel, it was a place to rest. I had booked the biggest room in a very nice hotel, The Jogja Dusun Village Inn. A collection of buildings centered around a large pool, and interspersed with gardens and canals, with koi and other fish making the rounds, the Village Inn is tranquil, friendly, spacious and charming place. My suite, 101, was the closest to the lobby, no stairs to navigate, and 8 steps from the pool. The main room had a huge canopied bed, and the bathroom was exposed to the open air, but I was walled off and separate from any other rooms, so I had fresh air but total privacy. So, imagining a kind of L, the long part of the L had the sink and countertop and toilet, and the short bar of the L had a massive bathtub, that could easily fit 3 people--the secret being that it wasn’t that deep, just deep enough to keep you covered as you reclined against the sides, all surfaces in irregularly-sized small tiles. At the junction of the L, that space was uncovered and open to the sky, with some plants growing in a patch of round white stones. If there was rain or too much breeze, you lowered some wooden blinds to block yourself off. The main bathroom area was one step higher than the tiny patio and bath area, so if it did rain, the splatter of drops on the marble floor would be inhibited in their progress. Off of the side of the bedroom, there was another open space, a sliver of patio with a lounge chair, and a tiny koi pond, which circulated its water up and over a tiny trickling waterfall. While its true that the weather during my stay was volatile--we had some shockingly intense rainstorms--and often windy on either side of a change in state, the hotel was an oasis--the wind went overhead, stirring the palm trees and providing air circulation, but not disturbing anything at ground level. Best of both worlds. Ahh. So, this first arrival day, I did SFA. I read, I watched Al Jazeera in English (which is excellent--my recent travels to places with cable have shown me how shockingly bad CNN has become--I want to know what’s happening on earth, and CNN spends an hour talking about fucking GOLF). I emailed, and then came the rain. Ok, so you have evaporation, water goes up, forms clouds, changing pressures and temperatures cause condensation, water falls. This I understand. Clouds are big, so, when mass condensation occurs, rain can be heavy. But rain this heavy? I mean, I would think the whole cloud, dropping rain at this furious rate, would be exhausted in like, 4 seconds. And just when you think that, just to prove you are an insignificant ninny, it starts to rain harder. And harder still! This was violence, an attack. Amazing. It prevented me, and my tired bones were ever so grateful, from going anywhere. I ran to the restaurant, and dined in the covered but open terrace, as all hell broke loose in an aquatic manner. Not only was my room spacious, calm, and private--but it seemed like, this being the low and rainy season, like I had the place to myself, at least the first couple of days--one older couple dined in the restaurant that night, and breakfast seemed to be for me and me alone. The rain gave up eventually, the waterfall continued to burble, I turned on the gentle and silent AC, and in like 40 seconds I was out. Done. And up at 3.30. I had booked a private tour of the local temples, UNESCO-recognized masterpieces of first-millennium religious art. Tho Indonesia is now 90% Muslim, which came by way of Middle Eastern traders and proselytizers, traders and proselytizers from India and other nearby kingdoms had introduced Buddhism and Hinduism before that. To broadcast their mastery of these belief systems, they erected ever bigger and better temples. Borobudur is a circular pyramid of complex carvings depicting thousands of scenes in the life of the Buddha, and above that, the symbolic hierarchy of states of existence leading up to Nirvana, perfection, one-ness. So the singular stupa, which is a hollow dome in this case containing a meditating Buddha, at the summit, symbolizes both the oneness of the ultimate, free of desire and even form, state of being...however, intriguingly, the meditating Buddha found inside the giant, singular stupa at the top was incomplete, unfinished...this is interpreted as symbolic of the elusiveness of perfection, but that also a flawed species such as the human race has the right to pursue the ultimate state of transcendence. Yanti, my tour guide, and our driver, whose name I didn’t catch but was himself a guitar player, picked me up at 4am, and before we left the outskirts of Yogya we stopped so I could grab a snack--they parked by a Circle K, but in front of that was a couple selling all kinds of homey food, and I bought a few things--a bright purple muffin, a triangle of paste-y vegetable something-or-other with a crispy exterior, and a tiny plastic box of nasi goreng. All delicious. There was also a slice of bright green cake that made me curious, too...but I didn’t want to bloat! We drove on, and slowly Java emerged from nighttime. Not that the activity in the city ever stops--the ramshackle eateries, the general buzz of commerce--it seems to be always on. This dropped off as we passed into the country side. Our arrival at Borobudur was timed to coincide with sunrise, and the sky was starting to flame in the east as we mounted the steps. There is a hotel right next to the site, and they seem to be the portal by which all shall enter, if they are an ‘official’ tour group. I think backpackers and people going in under their own steam have to enter at gate much further away and hike in a bit. I’m all about the saving of time, and the deluxe (‘in the manner which he is accustomed to...’) approach. End result: my guide and I climbed up the steps, turned around at the highest level, and watched the sun come over the horizon, as the surrounding area, much of which is jungle/forest, emanated mist, giving everything a cobwebbed, mysterious and, well...mystically beautiful look. Pointy volcanic peaks off in most directions, except south there is a geometrically improbable, gnarled folded ridge of forest covered geography, to steep to be inhabitable for the most part (it widens out towards the base of course, and there are homes and a very pricey resort tucked in). At one point, a Ted Geisel-worthy sworl of tree-encrusted limestone is crowned with a lamp, the only light on the top of the ridge. This is for the Javans an Olympus, the home base of their pre-imported major faith deities. Note: pagan beliefs and modern Islam are not particularly compatible in the eyes of some of the more...enthusiastic believers: read this article about a group of youngsters having a very difficult time seeing the forest for the tree. Meanwhile back at the temple. Yanti and I were the only people there for quite awhile, it was enough just to stand at the summit and scan the horizon, look down at nearby farms, a monastery, the forest. Not the same kind of busybody stuff going on here as there would be closer in to the towns. Soon, tourists started to emerge from the mist. But the temple is enormous--to walk around its three levels is at least a couple of miles worth of walking. Yanti took me around the level that commences the life story of the Buddha, showing scenes from the kingdom of Siddharta at the time of his birth, followed by events leading up to his birth, and then onward. Each panel (there are over 1500 of them) is meticulously detailed, and of course you have them on either side of you, so it’s an immense amount of info, an entire encyclopedia on the “Hill Temple” which borobudur translates to. These buildings are tall and pointy, and very much alive. As the heat of the day started to rise, the insects awoke, followed quickly by the birds. There’s something very striking and impressive about these giant columns of carved stone, ancient and silent, even more so when they seem a magnetic focus of the nature around them, with swallows, huge solitary wasps, and hundreds of dragonflies seeming to hover in a protective, interactive aura. Indonesia is also notable for the diversity, size and number of its butterflies--I counted at least 30 or 40 individual species that day alone--from tiny moths that looked like fragments of green leaves, to a gigantic butterfly with with white hind wings and black orange and white front wings, I would say this creature had a wingspan of perhaps 8 or 10 inches. Java has pythons and a poisonous, green vine-like snake, but I never saw any. Geckos and skinks galore, tho. We moved from Borobudur (after a pause for cafe at base camp hotel), to Mendut temple, and other nearby sites. Mendut is near a huge banyan tree, itself a collection of related trunks forming a body about 9 feet (3m) in radius, the branches and leaves overhead prob have a 50 or 60 foot radius. From above, vines that are really new tree trunks descend, hundreds of them--if they make contact with the earth, they will put roots down--the locals hack them back to keep the tree from taking over the whole village; don’t worry, it’s still plenty big. Next to Mendut is an active Buddhist monastery, which you are welcome to enter. It’s here that Yanti picked up a rambutan from the ground--a reddish thing covered in hairlike stems (thicker than hair, more like cherry stems, supple and not pointy). Inside is a lychee-like white pulpy thing with pit, three of them. It looks like lychee but is more straightforward sweet, without the floral notes of the lychee. Later we stopped at a roadside fruit stand to buy more salak, and to try the mangosteen, which looks like a squat purple tomato, but has very think skin that peels readily, and once again, you find some lobes inside that are translucent white like lychee, and sweet like rambutan. Fruit is so abundant in Indonesia I noticed that this plantation let tons of it, esp. jackfruit (jackfruit is a big thing, football sized and shaped, covered in pyramidical bumps), just fall to the ground. Most plantations will let you pay a fee to go in and have all you can eat--but not take away, you are back to kilo price should you want to walk away with any. Part two of our day was an exploration of the Prambanan temple complex, a Hindu temple roughly the same age as Borobudur. It was a good time for worshippers, they were feelin’ it back in the 800s. As many of its toppled stones were harvested by local villagers over the centuries, less of it is reconstructed than borobudur (which was preserved by way of being covered in volcanic ash by nearby Mt. Merapi) but the main temples are. Three huge telescoping pyramidic columns--the Shiva temple is 150+ feet (47m) high--pay homage to Shiva, Vishnu and Brama. Directly across from each one is the steed, carved in solid stone, of the facing god/goddess. Garuda the mythic bird, Nandi the bull...the Nandi is a fabulous work of art, incredibly realistic but also comprised of graceful curves. Shiva is not accessible, the site had just completed years of restoration when an earthquake struck in 2006; back to the re-drawing board they went, and the Shiva temple is not considered safe yet. Luckily the earthquake happened in the middle of the night, otherwise you would have had a lot of squished tourists. However, the Sheraton Hotel, with its *underground* guest rooms, which was damaged enough to be closed for two years...yikes. And so it was that the world experienced its own shocking tremor with devastating results this day--this week was the time of the Haiti earthquake--I was able to find out about it on cable news right away, and was able to donate as I had net access in my room. Prambanan has several different, mostly crumbled, temple sites, but they are fascinating and mysterious even in their deconstructed state. We spent awhile there, and then lunch was had, sort of tied in to an unavoidable look a silversmithing place, and then I was back at the hotel by early afternoon, 9 hours of temple examining with Yanti’s well informed commentary, a day well spent. That evening I cooled off in the pool, went to a street place about 15 minutes walk from my hotel to have gado gado and more, while a group of old, crusty Australians, I think one owned the place, gabbered in indecipherable Aussie patois. On the way back, I saw the tailor shop (more or less a metal shack, so think of that image rather than ‘shop’) was still open, three guys in there not really working on anything. The crotch of my jeans had come apart at the seam. I walked in and said hello, and said I needed some repair work. Long pause. Then, deadpan: “Too bad.” Long pause, then general laughter at my expense, then they fixed the pants for free (I wrapped a sarong around me). I intended to do...something, not sure what--but whatever it was, I didn’t do it. I fell asleep in like two minutes when I was back at the room, at like 9pm. YOGYAKARTA, 1/14 This was the day I went to the post office, first setting off on foot, but then when I saw that the locals were on the pedicabs, and they weren’t just for tourists, I thought...why am I walking in 85F heat? Pedicab to the rescue. Like 75 cents to get uptown. I did my business (postcard to Aden) and then while I was in the hood, I checked out the kraton, or what little of it I could. Here I found from my tour guide that female circumcision was no longer practiced, but boys were circumcised at 12. Aiyee--but evidently under general anesthesia. But still. Ow. After my tour, I went to a little food stall to have the famous ‘gudeng’--jackfruit, beef skin, and...’other stuff’ that is really, really tasty. Now, I have been dutifully avoiding motorbikes since a Bellingham psychic told my mom to keep me off two-wheeled motor vehicles (so a sidecar would be OK, and an eBike dubious) but when Rizky, the esteemed local musician who put my show together, came to pick me up--guess what: only one option. I donned the extra helmet and we set off and about 5 minutes into our ten-minute ride came down another mega-rain. We pulled up to a cafe, where the electricity was out but candles were already in place, and it was immediately pitch dark, and flooded, in the neighborhood. We weren’t going anywhere for awhile. But this was totally OK, food was served, and Rizky and I had a great time discussing the meaning of art, the meaning of our individual missions, and more. Teater Garasi is an art collective that puts on music, theater, and more in Yogya. Some of their productions have toured abroad, and one of the in house artists, Jompet, has made a serious name in art contemporain. He makes mechanical body enhancements that control or interact with sound generators...so, kind of dynamic kinetic sculpture that usually has a human inserted in it, that may or may not be in control of the results. Garasi has their own space, but might put on events in larger spaces too. Here we found the high art epicenter for Indonesia, Garasi is a shining emblem of the kind of high concept pursuits that Yogya has to offer in balance to the more potentially market-ready pursuits in Jakarta. If you think I prefer one to the other, you’re wrong. Both feed and influence the other, and both are necessary forms of the same huge enterprise--communication, which is the only art form I actually practice. Rizky has been pursuing music from an indie rock angle but also using his band to play the challenging music that accompanies theatrical works, evidently his band is continually in an intense workshop mode in pursuit of these projects. We had this great, ambling conversation by candelight, a mix of philosophy, exchanged wisdom, and humor--not out of place in a Woody Allen film....My Dinner With Rizky, perhaps. Fantastic. Then it was time to head to the show, it had slowed down a bit, the rain, and the lights came on in the restaurant (it looked much better candlelit, tho). We pulled up to Garasi’s HQ, next to a rice paddy a-burble with frogs. Garasi is a couple of offices, a kind of meeting room/kitchenette, a bar, and covered space with a small (but not elevated) stage. Chairs are arranged in a semi circle, and the front row is just a riser with some pads, so the chair folks can see over the front row’s heads. Technically, everyone is looking down at the stage. Despite the storm scaring some people off, the seats filled up and I played to, with and amongst the audience, who were great, attentive and appreciative. My damp sneaker soles were squeaking on the sustain pedal, so I took them off, oh...except, now I was grounding the PA, so I got a shock from the mic. So, easy--no mic. Shoeless, mic-less...that’s minimalism for you. I delivered a two-hour show and people really loved it. The rain was accompaniment for the first half, then the creek-creek of frogs--the performance space is covered by roof but not really totally enclosed from the outside, so it was a tranquil and cool/breezy place. The following day I took my last swim in the pool, checked out of my hotel (my stay cost me millions, literally. I felt like a sheikh. But, this is because Indonesia’s currency trades at over 9,000 to the dollar. I wasn’t sure if my sms’s were getting thru to Rizky, we were supposed to meet up but by 1pm I was so hungry I couldn’t wait, and went to a food stall for something that was concocted by me pointing to things that looked good; then I ran into Rizky looking for me, and we went for a coffee--at yet another cool, contemporary art place--this was a combo gallery, clothing shop and cafe with food (and internet too). Then he dropped me at the hotel, and I got my transfer to the airport, and flew to Jakarta. In fact, when I checked in for my flight, they offered to put me on an earlier one, since I could make it and it wasn’t full, so I took their offer, and by 6pm I was sitting in the far end of the terminal, having ice tea and free wifi. At about 9pm I went and checked in for my flight, and made my way to the gate; unf. the food didn’t look good at the cafe where I was online, and by ten everything was closed out by the gates. Grr. I had a miserable little piece of crap sandwich from the only thing open--Starbucks. Then, at last, I was on my way, and asleep. At 5am we landed in Manila, and a Philippines Airways employee guided me deftly around all the immigration and customs and back to security and made sure I was thru ok, which was truly awesome. Then I waited around until my flight to Taipei was ready. TAIPEI, 1/16 So, just some days before arriving I’d been exchanging messages with Jason, my contact in Taipei. Jason had sent me a friend request on Facebook some months ago, and, as I do, I had a look on his page to see what he was all about. It was in Chinese characters, mostly, so I sent him a message asking where he was from. And this began a conversation that led, ultimately, to this show. But in the meantime, as the show was drawing near, and we were getting into the last details, Jason asked me for my flight info. So, I sent him the details. But, then, a few days later, he asked me, once again for my flight info--so I sent it again, and didn’t hear back from him...hmmm. I got off the plane, cleared immigration and customs, and exited the arrivals area. No sign of anyone (oh, also, just to be extra extra sure I had texted Jason from Manila, yes, in the middle of the night). I walked around, trying to look like I was obviously me. No dice. I saw a potential rocker (Jason doesn’t feature himself, choosing abstract icons instead, on his Facebook profile, so I didn’t know his face) coming my way, I positioned myself to be seen and the guy strolled right on past. Ah. OK, I sat myself down at a coffeeshop in the arrivals hall, texted my location to Jason with no idea if he was getting my texts or not, and by the time my macchiato was on my table, Jason and his friend Duncan were approaching my table. They allowed me the pleasure of finishing my coffee and then we headed into the city. Duncan’s family during his childhood/adolescence followed his dad’s engineering gigs to Singapore and L.A. for some combined 15 years, and Duncan stayed on to complete school in L.A. and worked himself in the engineering field, so he speaks in colloquial American vernacular, actually reminding me in speech style quite a bit of my half brothers, he’s the same age as the eldest of my dad and stepmom’s three children. We drove into the city. Taipei shares some architectural motifs with cities in Japan--maybe a bit newer looking and less rambling. Tho it’s a big city, it’s by many degrees calmer than a city of its size should be. Again, no real center seems to be discernible. You could say the high rise mall by the central train station is the epicenter, and geographically you’d be correct--but people here don’t think that way. There is a rather inauspicious intersection of two main streets--not exploited in any kind of Shibuya/Times Square hoopla--that people call the focal point of the city. Duncan’s flat, where I was to be staying for the duration of my visit, is pretty close by. Duncan’s neighborhood has posh and trendy shops, but it’s not over the top glitz, even tho it’s prob. the choicest slice of urban real estate. I showered up and we went to lunch nearby. Food is excellent in Taiwan, as far as I’m concerned, and remarkably cheap for the capital city of a country that has clawed its way into the first world as one of the Asian Tigers. After lunch we walked around the neighborhood (the West Side) and I found that Taipei has a serious wine mania. There were several shops devoted to wine, but then we went into Taipei’s 24-hour ‘bookstore’, Eslite Mall, which is much, much more than a bookstore. It’s a gorgeously intellectual, but populist (I can’t explain that one, but trust me on this) department store, several floors’ worth. Now I understand the economic success of Taiwan. If pleasure is so readily available--gorgeous places to shop that aren’t cardiac-crisis expensive (Paris), but also aren’t plumber-butt bottom drawer like Wal Mart (my country tis of thhhhhhhpt), abundant delectable food in endless variety...well who wouldn’t work their tails off to buy in? In the US, your hard work will be rewarded in the following fashions: 50% of your paycheck will go to medical care that only being next door to Haiti can make us feel good about our accomplishments therein; then if you really make it you can fork over $100 to fork over ‘nouvelle cuisine’ that any French grandma wouldn’t force feed to a goose. Shopping is done in fat stores where fat dudes tell you that they have no idea which aisle the fat TVs are on. Fat chance. Spend ten minutes in Taipei where consumerism is much more of a sport/entertainment/lifestyle than the Americans who get so much crap for being consumers is, and you’ll realize: consumerism isn’t the thing being criticized--it’s just that we put laughable effort into laughable results. Anyway, I bought a postcard in the basement stationery department--again, reminding me of similar shops in Tokyo, but far less cluttered, more spacious and elegant. Then we hit the record/DVD dept--mind blowing selection, including a wall of vinyls, some of which appeared to be vintage. Wow. Then we hit the wine section--dozens of square meters of accoutrements, and then rows of Premier Crus. I mean, what I just described took up two floors--what the hell was the book department like? Phew. I couldn’t even *go* there. While we were out I picked up a set of strings for Jason’s guitar, his were pretty crusty, and then after a rest period we headed to the neighborhood of the venue, near the main University. We navigated the SUV down incredibly tiny alleys lined with bikes and cars, and managed to park somehow...dropped the gear at the venue. The Witch House, a very cozy little student bar that specialized in board games. Yep, they have walls of them, some for playing and some for purchase. They serve a little food, and coffee and drinks. No stage, just set up mid floor and go. Dinner was had, at a typical street stall, you see these all over town--ingredients to choose from (I chose some offal, some tofu, and a vegetable just cuz) are submerged in boiling soy sauce, a new take on the deep fryer, results are delicious, predictably. I washed it down with a bubble tea--milk with a little tea in it, sitting on black spheres of jellied-something or other. My favorite business name in a long time (that accurately describes the pleasant visual effect of the black edible jewels sunk down in the white beverage) was one of these bubble tea stands called “Wow....Frog Eggs!”. It’s basically like a milkshake in a way, separated into curds and whey. No ice cream, but cream, sure. So, back at the Witch House, the gamers packed it in, and Jason’s band Queen Suitcase set up. Carla sings and plays keys, Lester (ok: here I interject that all the Taiwan kids had Anglo names with a particularly British twist--when was the last time you met someone under the age of 80 named Lester? Their birth certificates will show Chinese names, but that gets set aside, even by the parents) and Jason play guitar and sing, there’s an awesome bass player and drums too. But it’s not loud, this was in a tiny cafe and it was appropriate volume. I thought their music sounded like Os Mutantes, with a little swinging London. Less fuzz guitar. more like early Cardigans kind of tones but slower tempos. Really cool. We didn’t have many seats to fill, so it was easy to have a nice full house, I would say 40 people and that was the maximum--a few rows of pews at one end, by the door, a thin stretch of picnic table along the wall which would technically be in front of the players, so if I was facing ‘forward’ I would be looking at them across the skinny part of the venue, and the pews would be to my right. To my left would be some round tables and parallel with me, the bar. I set up, did away with the PA because this audience was dead silent and the room had beautiful acoustics, and I had freedom to roam around and address the three angles in equal amounts. People were extremely receptive to the show (my intro in memorized Chinese helped), swaying when things got dreamy, leaning in when they got intense. There was a small exodus at one point when people had to catch the last trains, but actually a few more people came in at that point to, the net loss was survivable, and I played a very complete, enjoyable set, and people loved it. Afterwards we piled in the SUV and headed to a late night eatery. The band and a couple of their friends. I was forbidden to pay, and only allowed to eat (I even drank beer, so caught up in the hospitality I was) delicious food which was seafood of every imaginable stripe plopped down on a lazy susan. I think we ate for two hours, by which time it was well into the single digits on the clock, and the place was still going strong. On Sunday, Duncan had to work (he teaches English) for a few hours. I slept in, and started to write this blog entry--it’s been a massive undertaking. By the time D returned I was pretty hungry, and we headed by metro to the young people’s shopping district. I had a glimpse of the place when we stopped there yesterday to pick up my piano from another local musician. The district is dominated by a multistory karaoke palace. I had a recent epiphany recently about why in Asia the pop music is so cheesy, and why Peter Cetera, Air Supply, and other 80s dinosaurs seem to be the dominant musical trend of places like the Philippines. It’s because people’s musical life incorporates karaoke--and these songs are fun to sing. Cheesy-beyond-belief Chinese pop, Whitney Houston or her Indonesian counterpart--it’s all about how well it belts in the booths, a significant acknowledgment of the web 2.0 idea, if you think about it. Music doesn’t just come down from on high, from a place approved by the critics to be oohd and ahhd over (e.g. I asked my friends, who are musically astute if Fleet Foxes had made an impact here in Taiwan, and they said...uh.....absolutely....none). Anyway, Duncan and I warmed up for the upcoming eating Olympics with a little bit of gizzard on a stick washed down with Starbucks...strolled the shopping streets and then hopped the metro to the Nightmarket. First it was a warren, a souk, a hive, a hive, a nest of food stalls and ultra cheap retail, some legit, some not. Then they moved all the food stalls into a permanent, covered location, a massive indoor market whose high, warehouse style roof sort of keeps the illusion that you’re wandering outside intact. Of course, as soon as they were moved out hundreds more moved in, so the main Nightmarket is still the same old thing, but there’s seats now by the food market. Or you can pick from the small vendors amongst the clothing/cigarette lighters/flip flops/makeup/whatever stalls in the retail area. The retail area is alleys, uncovered. Packed with little shops/stalls selling all kinds of things. In the alleys themselves more vendors set up impromptu ‘shops’--essentially items on a rolling clothing rack or an unfolded blanket. There is a tacit arrangement with the police about these illegal, impermanent, non rent-paying vendors--the cops walk agonizingly slow thru the market (not hard to do considering you are in a packed salmon stream of humanity in every alley), giving plenty of time for the impromptu vendors to get the word, pack up and move somewhere out the line of sight of the popo’s. We started our explorations in the food market. It’s hard to pick a place--signs and hosts/hostesses are clamoring for your attention, along with ingredients, finished products, smells and sights. We found a table in a place specializing in soups, and I had a soup of pig heart. Plus ‘stinky tofu’ which isn’t very stinky but is quite nice, and from a nearby juice stand I had a juice of some fruit that looked like a melanoma-encrusted cuke, some kind of knobby witch nose nightmare that was stunningly good. My friends all said ‘ooh, sour, right?’. Uh, no...after that it was just wander, pick, and marvel. There was this item that was some kind of hard cake, that was then smashed, the resulting gravel sprinkled with a sweet or savory ingredient of your choosing, and the whole affair wrapped in a tortilla made from basically uncooked pie crust dough...fuckin a. I chose coconut and I chose well. After all that, and a drink made from sugar cane roasted on a hibachi, put in a kind of wood chopper to extract juice, and spiked with ginger...I could have called it there but in fact that whole food market was the amuse bouche for the *real* Nightmarket--ahhhhhhhh! So, we spent hours walking, trancelike cuz that’s how fast you can walk when you are crammed in an alley with ten million other people, occasionally grabbing a humbow or fried tofu. And then! we went to the Taipei brewery. It’s not well known but you can enter the grounds of this massive beer factory, late at night, and there’s a cavernous space for food and drinking. We had a pony keg (and once again, I drank beer just because it was fun) and the guys taught me Taiwanese drinking games. I was way too uncoordinated for the rock/paper/scissors based ones, but could get a handle on ‘Turtle, Turtle UP’ in which you place your hand on the table palm downward but fingers pushing up so it’s like a little turtle, make the invocation, and lift ONE finger, hoping that you avoid lifting the same finger as the guy whose turn it is to make the chant. You switch back and forth, speed has a lot to do with the fun of these games...well, I lost. A lot! Eventually it was closing time, and we emptied the keg into to go cups, and went out on the street. Oh, by the way, I should mention now that Taipei was in the 50s F at night, which after the tropics, was unbearable. So standing around at 11pm with beers, oh...horrible. Until...Marco, one of our crew, disappeared and came back with a little box. Betel nut! Betel nut, actually, technically does not exist. Betel is a vine, and the nut in this case is called areca and it comes from a type of palm tree. The nut is green on the outside, white on the inside with a brown core, pulpy, chewable but not really edible. The vine is like any vine. Plant-y. Centuries ago, it was discovered that the alkaloids in the leaf, when chewed with the ingredients of the nut, gets you a nice little high. It’s not only legal, it’s common in much of Southeast Asia, India, etc. In this case, the nut was sliced nicely in half but still connected at one end, so, butterflied, and a tiny slice of betel stem, making a disc a millimeter thick and about as big around as the battery in a watch, was glued to the interior of the nut by a gooey mix of spices, just a miniscule dab. You put the whole thing in your mouth and chew it, and soon your mouth is filled with juice, stained red by the spice daub (important: do not swallow). You spit it out, and continue to chew the pulp for some time. After 5 minutes, I felt warmth in my ears, and then warm all over, and slightly elevated. It works by causing your blood vessels to constrict, dispersing less heat to your exterior--with dramatic results. The effect lasts for about 5 minutes. There’s a little lift, caffeine like. But the sensation of warmth is remarkably effective, and saved my ass out on the streets of Taipei. I went for seconds! Then it was bedtime. The next morning I was up early, my cab came at 8. Duncan helped me down to my ride and I was off to the airport. I had time to mail Aden’s postcard from the airport post office, then check in for my flight, then head down to the basement of the terminal (Terminal 1 is a little old fashioned feeling, a kind of hospital-like utility) where the food is. Three choices--BK, a cafeteria with Taiwan dishes, and a sit down place, Jimmy’s kitchen (remember: no Chinese names in Taiwan). For about 8 bucks I had a bento-type lacquered box with two meat choices (BBQ pork and roasted duck were mine), sauteed eggplant, rice, tofu, and some other vegetables I don’t know the names of. There was a bowl of brothy soup too. I ordered a coffee at the beginning as my only beverage, but they have this timing thing where they wait until you are exactly 85% finished to serve it (I observed this in the other tables, too--the coffee was brought, without prompt from the diners, at the exact same moment). Thus stuffed, I headed to the gate. How about this for a pleasant exit: after a friendly immigration counter stamped me out with no line, I WAS THE ONLY PERSON GOING THRU SECURITY. That’s a good feeling. No lines, holding your pants up cuz your belt is in the tray, etc. And once again, I was on Philippine airways, in the same left side bulkhead window that my travel agent (Lisa at STA Travel in Seattle, one of the best in the biz) had snagged me on the other PR flights. I must say that Philippine offers a substantial amount of space in economy on most of their planes. In the meantime--an Aussie couple was having a fight with the crew. I was delighted, hehehe. He: business class, the only customer on this flight. She: next row back. My row. Econo. He: trying to say that she could ride up front too, tho she didn’t pay for that. PR: NOT HAVING IT. Good! Fuck that dude--if you didn’t think your arm candy was worth paying the full fare for, that’s your problem; don’t act outraged you fucking NITWIT. Especially on a TWO HOUR ISLAND HOP, you GARGANTUAN PIECE OF BAD TRAVELER TRASH. Landing in Manila, I was pleased that in their huff they forgot their IHT, so I grabbed that. I claimed my bag and headed to the other part of the V-shaped main terminal, for domestic flights. Air travel is crucial to this archipelago, and some flights are so popular that they use 747s. My flight was absolutely packed, but on an A330 (still a big one). I spent my long layover on the free net, and by the time we were up in the air I felt bad that I had asked the young guy to please vacate my seat (I was very gentle and polite, but still) just so I could look out the window at pitch black cuz it was dark. So, I could barely make out the lights and shape of Cebu CIty on our approach (furthermore, I was seated over the wing) but I could see it was pretty big. Nothing like Manila tho--man, that is an enormous burg. I had a good view when I flew out on the way to Taipei. I could count at least 7 huge clusters of massive steel-and-glass skyscrapers, and an incalculable amount of sprawl. I got my bag, and searched around the bag claim area for a sign with my name on it--there were several resorts with HQs right there in the arrivals zone, but not the tiny guest house in Panagsama Beach I had chosen (and chosen well). I went out onto the busy street level and then found the clipboard with the paper with ‘String Fellow” on it and got in an absolutely stunning Hi Ace van, which I had all to myself. Soft seats and smooth sailing for the 2.5 hour drive past Moalboal to my destination. We went thru the heart of Cebu City which was all about insane crumbling markets, shack eateries and tailor shops--it all looked positively foreign in the blackness of night. Then we’d bust past a gleaming mall or resort, or a very American looking fast food diner, Bob’s Big Boy kind of vibe, but brand spanking new and 21st century retro generic, and then back to kind of anarchic urban swelter...then we started to over the hump of Cebu the island, and were winding...there’d be a blind curve, no lights, and then in the crook of the curve a little roadside eatery, no customers but available. Dips bottomed out in potholes, scrawny dogs didn’t get out of the way til the last second and eventually we came around the bend and saw the far shore below us, I was dozing (and ravenous) by then. We will had almost an hour to go. So, when I snapped too, man, was I in a movie set. Panagsama Beach: welcome to the place where Gilligan’s Island and Apocalypse Now meet. A stretch of dive (as in scuba, not a quality judgement) shops and guest houses, with a rocky stretch of shore on one side and a dirt road on the other; the non-waterfront side of the street having just as many dive shops and guest houses as the infinitely preferable ocean side. In the dark it seemed like the absolute shipwrecked ass end of the earth. Perfect...that’s what I came for. To get away for a few days and be free to do or not do. When I arrived at Hannah’s guest house, I was let in and led to my ocean front room, high tide meant waves were lapping at a sea wall about 3 feet from my door. And the woman who gave me the key walked me to the only restaurant that was still in full swing. I chose from a table of locally caught fish (some big ol’ prawns, in this case) they grilled them up and served them with some ginger rice and a mango shake that was impossible to get half a sip down without inducing an iron-spiked ice cream headache. Good tho. I came to from my groggy day of travels on planes and bumpy Filipino back country roads, and walked back to my shack to the birdsong of various two-dollar whores calling out to me from every rope-lit iron bar. Tattooed whiteys worked on their local rum buzz. Goodnite. I got up for breakfast the next morning and made a great musical discovery, Asin: the Philippine answer to the Poppy Family. So good. You could also describe it as if Nico’s Chelsea Girl album had been recorded with a really good Hawaiian band. It’s awesome. This was a welcome break in the fray of spending lunch, as I did, listening to the Outfield (seriously! Is that shit even on CD??) or dinner listening, as I did, to Miley Cyrus. Tho I wasn’t into the fat guys with skinny girls two decades their junior vibe, other than that the scene here is way laid back, friendly, and safe. Lo season means there’s room to breathe and check out times are extremely lax. However, I decided to spend Tuesday in bed. As by lunchtime I was a sick as the mangy dogs that roam freely in this hamlet. I emptied all ballast chambers in rapid fashion (it’s always astonishing just how much liquid the human body can evacuate, and for how long), and although this meant I would enter Vietnam defenseless, I had little choice but to consume my only series of Cipro. But I was determined to get over it, and it was with a hopeful eye on a morning snorkel that I took two Imodium towards the end of the evening. At 6 some weird-ass critter woke me up. It was some kind of birdcall, that sounded like gasping, or coughing. It wasn’t human, but it wasn’t identifiable, that’s for sure. Amazingly, the wind-dislodged coconuts banging on my roof abated for the period of slumber. At 7.30 I was really awake, my stomach, which yesterday was a bloated source of stabbing, wrenching ick, was as placid as the morning sea. Nothing more seemed to be happening in terms of ejecta, so I bravely donned shorts and headed to the breakfast, and tentatively gummed some white toast. Then I headed to the dive shop and boarded a bouncing boat to Pescador Island. On board were the local boatman and dive guide, two German frogmen and a friendly Frenchman named Etienne, who was also promoting concerts as a sideline in Perpignan; and a young couple, a Finnish boy and a Swedish girl, snorkeling landlubbers like me. Considering the divers pay ten times as much to be on that boat as we snorkelers do, our presence was welcomed most hospitably. Pescador is a perfectly circular rock that rises up out of the sea a few minutes by super fast motor boat from our base camp. just under the surface, the rock widens out, so you have a bigger circle of coral, after which it all drops off and you can’t see anything. But the submerged coral zone is awesome for snorkeling. Our trajectory followed the divers, tho we couldn’t see them, but we flippered around the circumference of the island and met up with the boat about 80% of the full circle, about 40 minutes of snorkeling all told. The presence of the drop off is less intimidating as you have a few fishing boats and a couple of dive boats around. Swarms of fish of course inhabit the reef, and at the drop off there are huge schools of big sardines and other silver-colored food chain components. It was a pity to have to keep moving but there was no shortage of stuff to see. But just one huge outcropping of coral could easily serve as an hour of entertainment. The more you look, the more you see. As we came around to the side facing Cebu, the water was a little rougher and the fish bigger. Huge parrotfish, tangs and other interesting citizens were seen. And the water here was home to a large number of really weird jellyfish--they were slowly undulating pieces of ribbon. They didn’t seem too intimidating--if drifted too close to the bottom the fish picked at them mercilessly. We also spotted two sea turtles, one of whom did something I’d never had the timing to see doing: he/she came up for air, poking its cute little head above the surface for a gas exchange. I was hooked, so we zoomed back to base, and I was already ready for another go. I chatted with Etienne and his non-watersport oriented Cypriot gf, Hatice. They are quite nice, and we had France and music in common. She’s a classically trained violinist who has moved into a budding career as a singer of emotional, challenging vocal music like Gypsy laments and Russian romances. Snorkel # 2 of the day was at another drop off, off the coast of Cebu up a bit from Panagsama Beach. I was the only snorkeler, and I had a better idea of how to pace myself than I did on the earlier trip. I saw...well, so much diversity and color...electric blue critters gathered in a pop art tapestry; swarms of reef fish going for something edible that brought them up into my proximity; a box fish, ridiculous and clowny; surgeonfish, triggerfish, parrotfish, angelfish, butterfly fish...on and on. a huge sea cucumber, a yard long, and colored and textured and shaped exactly like the tail of a croc, down in a little sandy space. I haven’t mentioned the variety of textures and colors the coral and sponges and other adhered animals provide. Positively psychedelic, gentle and gorgeous. You’d see some eye catching, large boldly patterned fish, and then look closert at the same patch and then other, more intricately patterned ones would be evident, and closer still, and tiny monochrome ones would then be apparent. By that evening word had gotten out I was a singing man, and down by the dive shop a short stretch of sandy beach provided an impromptu hootenanny grounds, some local kids brought a couple of acoustics and we sat on the beach and traded songs. I knew I had found my people when the following miracle happened: two 20-something Filipino kids with pot leaf emblems on their caps ask me for a BGs song and can bust out every line of ‘To Love Somebody’ and one, Tim, actually says at the end: “Non Stop, Massachusetts same key!” I was home. A couple of hours, 4 billion blazing stars, two bottles of rum (not for me), fifteen singing young Filipino men, one advising Frenchman, and one polyglot torch song-belting Cypriotte later...after a selection of White Lion, Ken Stringfellow, the Eagles...I mean, this was their call, not to mention a reggae version of ‘Wonderful Tonight’...we had a great time. There were some great singers. I loved that by the end, the very small guy who had been mixing the rum & cokes was flat on his back and not really able to get up when I said goodnight. Also, the management team of the guest house, who had discouraged us from coming on the patio so as not to disturb the other guests, who I thought were totally disgruntled with the whole spectacle, watching with frowns from the porch...well, they were just waiting for something they could sing along to, hahhaha. So, from their perch, they busted into something we did, it was hilarious. They were still frowning, but they couldn’t help it--when ‘Dust in the Wind’ or whatever came up, they couldn’t help themselves, they *had* to belt it. Sadly, I woke up this morning ready for another round of le snorquelle but a storm had moved in. Water and sky were moody and grey. I saw the dive boats going, but I didn’t join them. Here’s hoping for a break in the afternoon. Love KS Panagsama Beach, Moalboal, PHILIPPINES 1.10.2010 After new year’s, we had just a few days left in the studio, and my bandmates started to head home one by one. We had come out ahead on the time equation, actually, we weren’t pressed for time, so one evening I could actually go to bed at a reasonable hour. Other days, however, I would stay up editing the vocals that I had sung that day, on more than one occasion I finished my work at 5 or 6am. We had time to cut three B-sides, covers of Norwegian punk and nu wave classics, where I sung the lyrics phonetically, tho I had also read translations so I could get where the lyrics were coming from. I went thru all the songs and added little touches to flesh them out--trying to stay true to the live-in-the-studio vibe but also keep them from being one-dimensional. I added piano, and harmonies where appropriate. Bjorn added a guitar part or two. One a song called ‘Long Black Hair’ I added backing vocals where I yelled along in certain spots with my main vocal, but yelled across the open strings of the piano with the sustain pedal down, making amazing, endless reverb. By heavily limiting the audio from the mics on the piano, we could bring down the level of my shouts so the subtleties of the piano reverb could be heard more clearly. We had a big dinner at the home of Jon Marius, our engineer, one evening, with his ms., Anneli Drecker, one of the most talented singers in Norway, easily, who has lately been touring the world with Royskopp. Their kids, and other family, the studio owner, our whole crew, were treated to ‘Finn beef’ or reindeer, flakes of it stewed in a kind of gravy. Yum. We actually went back and worked afterwards, stomachs all poking out. And then it was done--the last day and nite was spent doing a few more vocals, doing the overdubs on some of the Norwegian punk stuff, doing a couple last minute keyboard parts, and editing all the vocals I did that day. I had a photo session with Paul, a photographer from Bergen who came up just to hang out and do a session with me. Finally, on a Wednesday morning, I was picked up by Joel at 8 and taken to the airport. I felt like I had survived a kind of endurance test, being isolated and in the cold for so long. But I also felt we had made a great record. I should mention that we had time in the last days to mix 5 songs, so I had a clear indication of where things were going. But I was thrilled to be going home to see my family, even if it was to be short-lived. I was hardly prepared for landing in Oslo at noon and finding it ablaze in sunshine. I hadn’t seen but a rumor of the sun for the last two weeks so it was a bit shocking. I checked in for my Paris flight and settled into a cafe to chill for the next few hours while I waited for my flight to Pairs, which of course ended up being delayed by about an hour. Murphy’s law makes a last minute cameo. We landed at Charles de Gaulle and waited quite a bit of time before the bags came. I had time to buy a big chunk of phone credit for my mobile so as to be sure I had ammo for as many sms as I wanted while I was gone on my next trip. I looked at the departure screens at far flung destinations and thought, that’s gonna be me in like 15 hours. Bag came, cab was grabbed and I was home. There was the ceremony of presents for Aden, hugs and kisses for all. Aden had written some books detailing the adventures of various school-attending rabbits (like Watership down but with breastfeeding for some reason). We had dinner together, played with Aden’s new toys, listened to the Disciplines mixes. I unpacked and packed. Suddenly everyone had crashed. I finished up my business and joined them. At 6.30 I was up. The house was dark, warm and still. Outside it was snowing, just a little. Paris always looks so good in the snow. I started to get ready for my trip and slowly my family started to assemble. In the excitement, Aden had forgotten to eat her dinner last nite. I ran to our favorite breakfast place, Maison Karrenbauer, which bakes what I now believe are the best pains au chocolat in town. Unf. I caught them at opening time, and they weren’t that morning’s batch, but still, very good. Ran back in the snow to get them to the house, and we enjoyed our petit dej and cafe, and then it was time to go. It was so hard to leave them. Impossible for us to have a proper goodbye. Of course all were crushed, including me, that my visit was so short. School and work were canceled on account of mourning my departure. I called from the taxi, from the airport, from the plane. I checked in. Cleared security. Headed to the gate, which didn’t have much for chairs. Had another cafe. Boarded. What the hell was I doing? I settled in on my Gulf Air flight to Bahrain. We flew over Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey--I had a good view, despite sitting over the wing, of the mountains that comprise the frontier of Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Baghdad was on the other side of the plane from me, but I could see Basra and then the blackness of the Persian Gulf (night fell as crossed Iraq) dotted by the cigarette-cherry glow of oil wells burning off their excess. Towards the end of our flight, both the guy sitting next to me and I took off our headsets, and had the chance to chat briefly. He was Bahraini but had until recently lived in Paris. He had traveled a lot, never mentioned what he did for a living, but he had things to say about all the places I was going, and offered me much encouragement on my tour. I walked into the terminal--we were a little bit late, but still OK for making it. Not many seats or much to do by the gate. Europeans, Indians, Arabs, Nepalese, Americans all waited for their flights. Bahrain was comfortable with being a crossroads at the center of the world. In fact, I really wanted to stay, the place has, at least in the airport a friendly and cosmopolitan vibe. I have a real fascination for the Arab/Middle Eastern world, and hope to visit it--I have been working on a few things to that end. Anyway, got on the next flight, and as soon as my dinner was consumed I went to sleep and got in some decent hours. No breakfast for me, so I kept sleeping til we were on the ground in KLIA. KUALA LUMPUR, 1/8 Kuala Lumpur Int’l, as I have noted before in this blog, is an awesome, big, gleamingly modern airport. Again, I wanted to just wander around, just as a mall it’s fantastic--and it happens to offer airplane rides. Fantastic. No problem with the formalities, Malaysia is very liberal in its immigration and happily awards almost all nationalities a 90-day tourist/business visa on the spot. How reasonable--why can’t they all be like that? Soon I spotted Jay, as I came out of the customs, happy to see a familiar face. Jay is a local musician and my main contact for organizing this tour and the release of The Disciplines album here, since Amar from the label doesn’t speak super English. Amar was there, tho, and also Ili, who recently got her master’s degree in music biz stuff in the UK. Ili is super organized and a great translator, and between the three I knew I would be well taken care off. Our first order of business was to nail down this MRI that I needed to get done. Prescribed by my French doc, to check up on some things that have been bothering me, innards-wise. Not covered by my US insurance, an MRI in Paris is gonna run you about $1000. No thanks. It was cheaper in Norway, but with the holidays, it was impossible to organize. So, I had asked everyone here in Malaysia to do the footwork if they didn’t mind, and they found out where to go, a small hospital. I knew not to eat beforehand, so I skipped breakfast on the plane and of course all thru the airport I was bombarded by sights and smells of yummy food. And I oh so wanted cafe. This was serious eastward travel, the kind the worst type of jet lag was associated with. Naturally at the hospital there was a lot of waiting and going here to get this paper and that, a consultation with a local doctor was required, and then I was free to have the MRI. This means laying in a tube with weird noises--I was sure it was very monotonous techno, but maybe it was the machine?--for a very long thirty minutes, arms held back over my head to clear the space near my abdomen which was being scanned. “Don’t move, OK?” they said. Luckily the tube has a little AC blowing and gentle light inside. I was in a kind of smock, and were it not for the abnormal positioning of my arms, I thought, I could sleep here. mmm. Then it was done. I dressed, paid (medicine is free for Malaysians but as a foreigner I still paid about $300 for experience, but again, that’s 75% off the Paris price). Importantly, now I was free to EAT and we went to a place nearby. Ahh. At this place you look at a menu with pictures of the items available arranged in little plates of 5, but it’s good to know that when you order you only get one--and some of those things are things that will appear in your soup, and only one at a time at that. I had one fish in a chili sauce, and then the soup, with one giant okra, one slice of eggplant, one chunk of tofu, one small fish cake. For thirst quenching I had a barley drink--little grains of barley in water (or perhaps coconut water?). Now, I am one of those people that does it all wrong--when traveling I eat fruit, have ice in my drinks. I try and avoid roadside food (unless it happens to look especially delicious). I have had remarkably few bad experiences with food around the world, and these are evenly distributed between all the continents I have traveled (except so far nothing has befallen me in Australia/NZ). Malaysian diet--which rotates Malay, Indonesian and Chinese dishes most commonly--is always spicy and thus good for chemically roasting the bad guys that might hop along for the ride. Oh, while we were waiting in one of many waiting rooms that morning, Ili managed to sort out a show for me in Jakarta, just like that. After lunch, I changed more money to offset the Ringgit I had blown thru at the hospital. However, other than that trip and a visit to a net cafe, I have been forbidden by my hosts to pay for anything--meals and drinks have been covered. So, I pretty much have all that Ringgit in my pocket now. Then we had a coffee--a ‘white coffee’, lots of condensed milk and sugar. Cold. By now it was about 3pm, we checked me into the hotel and I begged off soundcheck. So I did the stupid thing and took a one-hour nap, and that was gonna cost me dearly in the next 24 hours. I had just given entry to the forces of jet lag, and they wasted no time in conquering the fortress of my alertness. I admired the 13th-floor view, showered up, shaved, felt pretty good. Hotel wifi wasn’t working so I went to a net cafe and reached out to my peeps, then came back to the hotel in time for dinner. We chose the restaurant in terms of wifi, but the food was awesome. Arriving at the venue, the Cloth and Clef (for its interest in fashion and music), I was greeted by friends and fans, and felt great. Oops, I forgot my capo, so I walked back to the hotel, doing interviews with local journos on the way up and the way back. Back at the venue, There was an acoustic duo playing, the female singer had a very good voice, actually; then Jay played, then a little set from Couple, friends of mine from last time. I checked out Jay’s Squire Jazzmaster and upon touching one of the strings, it broke instantly, so I changed the top three strings and then it was showtime. Now, the C&C is on the main drag of Bukit Bintang, which is the most happening area of nightlife in KL. The whole place is cocktail bars, cover bands, all kinds of noise; every place has a patio with music going full blast. And Malaysians are loud talkers in general. But the 40 or so hardcore listeners around me came in close, and I could communicate with them no problem. The other 30 odd people in the (tiny) place were also listening, but since the place is so cozy, they didn’t feel the need to stand. However, when I sang off the mic, since the club has such a multilevel, windy layout, it was hard for the people in the other areas to know what was going on. So their ambient chatter went up a bit. But still, I could do my thing. And, a few people there were singing along, which was pretty amazing. After a while, I looked for some variety to my show, since there was no keyboard. So, I dragged everyone out onto the patio and used Jay’s acoustic to play a couple of songs--insane, since this was going out the loudest place imaginable--a cover band was blazing away across the street, Cuban music was playing full blast next door, cars were going by thumping techno. Still I shouted and did my thing for a couple of songs, and people loved it--it might not have been the greatest musical circumstances but it was kind of a happening--people stopped on the sidewalk and listened, too. Then I took everyone down into the sunken area next to the stage and did a couple of songs (a first ever rendition of a new Disciplines song ‘Take Off That Halo’) and then ended up by the bar, and finished the evening with two final songs on the noisy patio. People loved it, and it was fun, and definitely off the wall, but still musical (mostly). And that was only part of the night--next we drove to a huge disco called the Zouk, and in one of their smaller rooms (but still a decent sized bar) called Barsonic, which was having their indie rock nite, I DJd for an hour--interspersing my choices with requests for Stone Roses and Oasis. I had a good run playing Arctic Monkeys, The Long Winters and something else back to back that actually had people dancing. They didn’t dig the hip hop I played that much, and one guy kept asking for Chris Rea ‘Road to Hell’. But, hey. Then I was really done...I had been suffering that lead-blooded jet lag for awhile, but now....it was serious. They took me back to the hotel, I had a call from Dom, and then I paffed. Obs: I was amused that in an advert for a net provider, as is typical, “broadband” was in italics as a foreign word, but “wayalas” was as if it was completely Malay in origin. MALEKA, 1/9 What people eat for breakfast here is pretty much what they eat for lunch and dinner--noodles, rice and chili or curry things to put on top. In other words, AWESOME. I hit the hotel breakfast spread and then got my act together upstairs, then came down and there was Jay, and soon was Amar and the tiny Suzuki mini (and this is not a marketing euphemism). And their friend Adam. We stuffed my suitcase into the back and drove to what was meant to be a famous chicken rice place. Chicken rice is a Chinese thing that is ubiquitous in Malaysia, at least as far as I’ve experienced it so far. You have rice, then a piece of chicken (you have the choice of steamed or roasted). The chicken has been machete’d into slices that run counter to the bone, so you have a cross section of chicken in each one. Then you have a little bowl of broth, which you pour little by little on your rice (and add habanero sauce to, uh, taste) But, there are also other dishes offered--I chose some kind of greens, and Jay some calamari, and all of this was superb. So, between a belly full of yummy food, a two-hour ride in on a hot sunny day, and extreme jet lag, I totally crashed into a druggy, muggy dreamscape, where I was never sure if I was awake in the van or dreaming about being awake in the van). I stumbled out at the apartment hotel in Maleka, contacts glued to my eyelids. Maleka, or Malacca to you tubobs, used to be the dominant seat of commerce and empire in the region. There was a badass Sultan being cool and ruling here, then came the Chinese; a century later the Portuguese; a century later they were supplanted by the Dutch, and some wars and what not later, the British. The Japanese paid a visit in the 1940s, the British came back--all the while Maleka was HQ. Then independence was granted in the 1950s (the proclamation signed in what had been the British fat cat clubhouse) and all of a sudden KL was the joint. Maleka is still important, a city of some 700,000 people--most of them trying to sell you a plastic hat or give you a ride on a pedicab that blasts techno at volumes that make a mockery of physics. But mostly it is a kind of museum, in a way. On the flat land along the river, streets lined with touristy shops full of--stuff?--are the thing. You head up to a prominent hill and see that the Euros had no moral problem taking the high ground for themselves--tho it should be noted that the sultan had built his huge, pointy wooden palace down the hill pointing towards the water (now further away thanks to a modern land reclamation project that has squeezed perhaps a couple hundred identical row houses onto the new surface). On top of the hill you find the British HQ, Roller still in the the little prissy-ass carport out back. Then the old church, built by the Portuguese when the only thing Columbus had sailed so far was his rubber ducky. The building is roofless and crumbling, but the heavier slabs used for covering graves are still there, and have been uprooted and leaned on the wall. You can see how the Portuguese couldn’t be bothered to write in Latin after the first few years, or just forgot how, and how the Dutch language evolved (de-volved?) in spelling over the course of their stay. Women and children died quicker than they could be manufactured, and men, well, they died too, eventually. There was activity galore--lots of tourists (mostly local ones--this area is Malaysia’s Independence Square so a required school trip stop) and a huge field where noise was being made in great quantities, it seems they were setting up for a big event there. The summit of the hill affords a very good overview of what the city is up to; even if you can’t exactly interpret all the frenzy, it’s still great theatre. By now it was about 6pm, so we went to a little food enclosure--open space with plastic tables, surrounded by food stalls. A central command center provides drinks. One of the many things I love about Malaysia is that food is always accessible, and always delicious. All hours, all days. Before I went to bed in KL I looked down on the street below and could see all the restaurants on my street going full tilt, it was about 2am at that point. This place was just getting going at 6, the open air places don’t serve lunch in the blazing sun, generally. Not knowing what was available, it looked like there was hardly anything to eat, but suddenly a table near us had all this great looking food coming, and I gave my official OK--I ordered, noodles and tofu and shrimps in curry sauce--I asked for it hot which is sort of like asking for rude service in a Parisian brasserie. It’s like, duh, gringo, what do *think* you’re getting? Being a hospitable people, they of course obliged. I picked the chili slices off the top of the bowl and just in proximity the things were, like, completely radioactive. Then we spent some time at the hotel, catching up on email (which was cool, as it prevented me from being tempted to take a nap). And then, we headed to the show. This show was super punk and really...inspiring. Held in a rehearsal place, there was room for about 45 people, maybe a bit more if everyone was standing but most people chose to sit on the floor. There were little tiny white bread sandwiches available, kind of school or church vibe in how wholesome it was. It was just about the music. All young kids here. Jay was playing when I arrived, and then I played. Of course, closed in like that I needed no mic, except when I played the little Yamaha keyboard I sort of used the mic on occasion. So, people totally listened, although, being kids at both shows, the audience I know in Malaysia has a tendency to giggle at weird moments, but after the initial time, I know not to take it personally! Also, if someone gets a call, they just take it. It’s not a big deal there. Well, it was a great show, and being an hour in length, it was so easy...then the headlining band, Khottal, a local band set up. Definite Arcade Fire vibe--but really really good. Three drummers divide duties, standing and beating either a floor tom, a big bass drum or snare and cymbals. There’s a bass player, two guitarists, a keyboard player, an accordion player, a Melodica player, a glockenspiel player, and a singer. They have some super beautiful songs. I watched for awhile, then I needed to sleep. In this heat, with spicy food, and Malarone malaria meds, I have the weirdest dreams....I could use even more.... Love KS on the highway to Singapore.

The latest release by Ken Stringfellow is a split EP with Spain's Muy Fellini, featuring never-heard-before music incl. Ken's take on Bob Dylan, released by King of Patio records in Spain on Oct 8, 2009. Order it directly from Muy Fellini here www.myspace.com/muyfellini 10" VINYL ONLY!!! Subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date on all things KS! older news : 8/3/2003 05/01/2004 - 06/01/2004 06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004 07/01/2004 - 08/01/2004 08/01/2004 - 09/01/2004 09/01/2004 - 10/01/2004 10/01/2004 - 11/01/2004 11/01/2004 - 12/01/2004 12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005 01/01/2005 - 02/01/2005 02/01/2005 - 03/01/2005 03/01/2005 - 04/01/2005 04/01/2005 - 05/01/2005 05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005 06/01/2005 - 07/01/2005 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005 08/01/2005 - 09/01/2005 09/01/2005 - 10/01/2005 10/01/2005 - 11/01/2005 11/01/2005 - 12/01/2005 12/01/2005 - 01/01/2006 01/01/2006 - 02/01/2006 02/01/2006 - 03/01/2006 03/01/2006 - 04/01/2006 04/01/2006 - 05/01/2006 05/01/2006 - 06/01/2006 06/01/2006 - 07/01/2006 07/01/2006 - 08/01/2006 08/01/2006 - 09/01/2006 09/01/2006 - 10/01/2006 10/01/2006 - 11/01/2006 11/01/2006 - 12/01/2006 12/01/2006 - 01/01/2007 01/01/2007 - 02/01/2007 02/01/2007 - 03/01/2007 03/01/2007 - 04/01/2007 04/01/2007 - 05/01/2007 05/01/2007 - 06/01/2007 06/01/2007 - 07/01/2007 07/01/2007 - 08/01/2007 08/01/2007 - 09/01/2007 09/01/2007 - 10/01/2007 10/01/2007 - 11/01/2007 11/01/2007 - 12/01/2007 12/01/2007 - 01/01/2008 01/01/2008 - 02/01/2008 02/01/2008 - 03/01/2008 03/01/2008 - 04/01/2008 04/01/2008 - 05/01/2008 05/01/2008 - 06/01/2008 06/01/2008 - 07/01/2008 07/01/2008 - 08/01/2008 08/01/2008 - 09/01/2008 09/01/2008 - 10/01/2008 10/01/2008 - 11/01/2008 11/01/2008 - 12/01/2008 12/01/2008 - 01/01/2009 01/01/2009 - 02/01/2009 02/01/2009 - 03/01/2009 03/01/2009 - 04/01/2009 04/01/2009 - 05/01/2009 05/01/2009 - 06/01/2009 06/01/2009 - 07/01/2009 07/01/2009 - 08/01/2009 08/01/2009 - 09/01/2009 09/01/2009 - 10/01/2009 10/01/2009 - 11/01/2009 11/01/2009 - 12/01/2009 12/01/2009 - 01/01/2010 01/01/2010 - 02/01/2010 02/01/2010 - 03/01/2010 03/01/2010 - 04/01/2010 04/01/2010 - 05/01/2010